The delight Woody Norris takes in
his inventions is that of a kid who grew up to be a toymaker, but didn't really
grow old.

The interview in his Poway,
California office is punctuated with grins and, "Do you want to see something
cool? Let me show you this!"

Whether it's a one-man helicopter
that takes 30 minutes to learn to fly or stereo speakers the size of an Oreo
cookie, you're nodding along with him, "Yeah, I've got to have this."

His enthusiasm is infectious, and
his innovative creations back it up -- was Thomas Edison like this, you wonder.

How could he not be? The power to
conjure up your wildest dreams -- high tech items you'd most like to browse
through at Best Buys, inventions you know the world will beat a path to your
door for and will pay a ton of money for. And through it all, he seems a little
bit in awe of the possibilities himself. He quotes Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001
Space Odyssey -- "'Pure science is magic.' It is magic. The stuff we do
today -- magic," enthuses Woody.

The striking thing about Woody is
that he doesn't seem like a genius. And he'll be the first to tell you that. The
way he explains things is simple and understandable for the scientifically
challenged, unlike those idiots whose job it is to write simple computer manuals
that nobody understands.

He's no techno nerd. If more
science teachers were like him, our world would be full of new marvels daily.
Born in Barrelville, Maryland (which is right next to Mt. Savage, which is near
Cumberland, of Cumberland Gap fame), his father was a coal miner with a third
grade education and his mother only went through eighth grade.

Woody's electronics knowledge is
mainly self-taught, consisting of repairing broken radios he begged from the
local repair shop on the way home from school. "I had a chicken coop full of 20
or 30 or 50 radios... I fixed most of them." He had a mere six months of basic
electronics training in the Air Force, where he worked with radar and electronics used to trigger A and H bombs.

"You know how some people can play
the piano, they just pick out notes? I've always had that ability with
electronics and I know rudimentary things about circuits just intuitively, or
like it's psychology, know how they worked. And if I don't, I can figure it out
pretty quick with just a clue here and there. So most of my electronic training
is pretty elementary." Is there such thing as an inventor savant?

Woody joined the Air Force right out
of high school because the hi-fi store to which he'd applied for a job didn't
respond fast enough. While the results of the aptitude test he took in the Air
Force said he could do anything, he was funneled into electronics, and stationed for
a time at Monzano, a top secret base located inside a mountain in New Mexico.

"I hated it. I hated the Air Force.
I wasn't making any money." To supplement the meager military paycheck (his Air
Force duties only ran from 6:30 till noon), Woody worked as a cameraman at the
ABC affiliate in nearby Albuquerque.

"I had a full time job from four
until midnight. I was always dead tired. Midnight till 6:30 I got to sleep.
Working at the TV station, I met a lot of pretty girls. We had a Dick Clark type
dance thing. And I would date all the girls because I was the cameraman right
out on the floor."

After four years of working his way
up to Airman Second Class ("about as low as you can get"), he got a
job at the University of Washington fixing electronic equipment. "I was
making four hundred bucks a month, which was terrible at the time. Because I
worked for the university, I could take classes for free. So I just took one
during the day and then as many evening classes as I wanted for free. So I was
having a heyday. I had a little old English Riley car that you cranked to
start."

The courses varied -- electronic
engineering, philosophy of religions, Spanish, business, psychology,
accounting... a mishmash of knowledge which would serve him well in later years.

He regrets not attaining a degree,
but, well, you know, he invented a couple of things and became slightly busy...
not to mention rich.

While working on a phonograph tone arm that would eliminate
the common linear tracking problems of the turntable, word got out and a fledgling company
in Salt Lake City approached him about developing an invention for them. And
oh, since one of the four partners was a doctor, they said it would be good if the
invention was medical.

Using his experience in the Air Force, Woody came up with
a sonar version of radar to listen to sounds inside the body.

"When a car
or truck or train goes by and you hear the whistle go, aaaayuuuuu, it goes up
and then down in pitch because sound waves travel at a finite, fairly slow
speed. The pitch changes if the waves are moving as they are being produced. So
I got this idea to emit ultrasonic sound into the skin, just with a little thing
on the end of a flashlight I bought at Radio Shack. I put a speaker on the other
end and through some little tricky math and manipulation, if anything under the
skin was moving when that ultrasonic wave went in, it would bounce back -- the
movement would cause it to shift its pitch. And by some tricky circuitry you
could hear the movement under the skin."

The difference between Woody's
"doppler" tool and a stethoscope is important. With a stethoscope, any
particular sound to which you're listening -- whether a heartbeat, breathing,
the heartbeat of a fetus -- is obscured by all the other sounds in the body. The
doctor has to learn to discern it. But Woody's product was like a laser beam,
with the ability to zero in on a particular blood vessel and stay on it even if
a bunch of others crossed over it.

"I stole the idea from FM radio.
There are only one hundred FM channels in the country, but there are 50,000
stations, maybe. So the same frequencies are used over and over again all over
the country, they just keep them away from each other. But if you're on the
fringe of losing an FM station, and you're moving into another one on the same
frequency, it'll keep the weak one over the strong one because it's locked into
that one. That's the nature of frequency modulator radio signals."

And, Woody admits, "You know what?
I didn't invent that. It happens and I observed it. And so I claimed it. You
know what inventing is -- I heard this from somebody else -- 'It's an accident
observed.'"

Woody's doppler tool eventually evolved
into the sonogram. "They put pictures to it and all that; mine was just
sound. But that was a pretty big deal," says Woody in a massive
understatement. "I made it on a weekend and I sold it and I quit working
for the school. And I haven't really -- except for a real brief time -- worked
for anybody since I was in my early 20's. I made my own living by my
wits."

Woody was given 50,000 shares in
the company and, at the time, knowing nothing about the stock market, he didn't
pay attention when the company went public. A year later, they called to inform
him of a secondary stock offering and the piggybacking of some of the shares of
the founders. Woody casually asked what the stock was worth and was pleasantly
surprised to find out that the shares had gone up to $8.

"So I had three
hundred and some thousand dollars worth of stock for a weekend's work a year
before. I quit work at the university and bought a milling machine and a lathe
and a grinder and a sander and a drill press and every tool you could conceive
of. I rented a little place and set up an inventing company and started to
invent. Is that cool?"

Woody was still struggling with his tone arm when
the Heath Technic Corporation offered to buy it and pay him to perfect it.
Because he said he didn't want to work with other people, the company rented him
his own private state of the art facility within a mile of his house.

"I was totally spoiled! I was
making $600 a month when I left the university and I was making nothing when I
was on my own for that brief time. They offered me $48,000 a year. That was
$4,000 a month. I had so much money I didn't know what to do with it."

When Heath fell on hard times, he
bought the tone arm back, then sold it to another person for a big chunk of
money. Woody's empire was off and running. "So then I just started inventing
stuff. And it's like anything else, once you start doing it, you get good at it.
You get the routine down. Inventing is mostly a routine, I think."

So what sparks invention?
"Thinking about it. If you are interested in math, and you read books on
math and you do formulas, pretty soon you'll get insights that other people
don't get because you attend to it. If you like music, writing music, or
whatever, you'll develop a skill. Now, I will tell you that people who play the
piano strictly by rote, taking lessons for 20 years, will never be as good as a
guy who also has a knack. It's like an athlete. You can go to a certain limit as
an athlete, but if you don't have the muscle structure and that and this and the
other, the way the whole body is fixed when you're born, you'll never be a
Michael Jordan. So there's a combination."

A vital part of Woody's winning combination
has been his ability to sell himself and his products. Woody credits his high
school drama experience. It began purely by accident when a boy he used to walk
home with asked him to wait after school while he read for a part in the play.

"He said, 'You know, you should
read, too.' So I got the lead in the play. And I got the lead in every play I
ever did. When I graduated from high school, I got a national thespian award for
acting. I was always going to do that (acting), but after high school, I went
into the Air Force. When I got into the cameraman thing, I thought, 'When I get
done with this, I'll go back and do acting.' But I didn't because I thought of
an invention. I became an inventor."

"But I'll tell you something,
if you're an inventor and you start out poor the way I did, you need to
know how to speak publicly, to convince people to invest in you. So the drama
that I did in high school was the best thing I ever did. Never had any fear in
front of any audience."

The inventor first stepped into the role of
spokesman after inventing a child locater device to foil kidnappings. The VIPs of
the company asked Woody to tag along to a TV interview in Los Angeles, just in case
there were some technical questions they couldn't answer.

"They had this
little room off to the side where the host took all of us. We sat behind the
camera and the president sat with the host in front of the camera. The light on the camera comes on and the host says, 'First of all,
tell us who you are, sir,' and the president says, 'Uhhhh. What's my name?' He
couldn't remember his name. He says, 'I can't do this.' So I got drafted."

Woody completed the interview and
became the point man for the company for all subsequent interviews. After that
first interview, the TV station's switchboard operator told them they'd "gotten
more calls than the day Reagan was shot."

That's not to say Woody's a one-man
show. He has developed a system of inventing, often working with a team of
engineers and inventors.

"I got some intense electronics
training for like six months in the Air Force, but I don't think it was college
level. Everybody around here knows more than I do, but I speak all of it enough
to not look stupid. And I know enough to find answers when I've got things I
need to implement or to do. I'm way over my head right now in some of the
inventions I'm working on, but I always do that."

His is the creative mastermind, the
one who has the vision, the one who can gather pieces of knowledge and put them
together to answer "what if?"

"I came up with the idea for
all these inventions and I would usually do a very crude prototype. But often
after the prototype and the concept emerged, the engineers I would hire executed
it with a whole different route, but ended up with the same destination... But
these guys can't dream up products. I've got a really good gift of determining
before you spend any money if a product is stupid or not. And most people lose
that objectivity when they get involved in anything. Writing songs or writing a
book. They think everything they do is wonderful."

"I read about Thomas Edison. He used to hardly ever
sleep. Three or four hours at a time at the most. He would take keys and he'd
sit in a chair and hold the keys. If he dozed off and the keys would drop on the
floor, he'd wake up and he'd go to work. I don't do that. But I'm always
thinking. Two o'clock in the morning, I'll wake up with ideas and I'll jot them
down by the side of the bed. I jump around a lot by nature because I don't have
a very long attention span. I always butt in, and I'm trying to shake that
habit, but I can't help it. And sometimes I've got it before the guy's gotten it out.
Sometimes I don't get it and I'm thinking I've got it, but I didn't."

He has thirty or forty U.S. patents
and over 300 patents around the world, and another fifty or sixty pending.
Currently, he's working on four things at once, three of which are top secret.
"If any one of them succeeds, we'll all be rich," says Woody.

"Most inventors, the statistics
published by the U.S. government say that one out of 2,000 patent applications
issues as a patent. The rest are rejected. Out of the ones that do issue, one
out of 2,000 of those issued patents ever makes enough money in its lifetime to
pay what it cost to get it. So what's that? Four million. I've been really
lucky. I think that's the lucky talent, to know when you've got a stupid idea.
And most ideas are stupid. Most of mine are stupid."

So what's the stupidest he's come
up with? "I usually don't spend more than a few minutes on something really
stupid. I spent years on those books on tape. We recorded, for instance, an
entire unabridged novel on one tape. Sixteen, twenty hours on one tape. We spent
hundreds of thousands of bucks on it. To get the material, we hired college
students from the university. They would work for five bucks an hour. But none
of the distributors, the bookstores, wanted them because they wanted to sell a
lot of tapes. So they didn't want a book on one long tape. And that was
terrible. I can't think of any more stupid ideas. I guess you put those out of
your mind."

It actually sounds like a great
idea for consumers, just wrong for the marketplace. But that's another thing about Woody --
anything worth doing is worth doing for profit. Judging from the high security
and high tech outfitting of his research and development facility, business must
be good.

Not bad for a small town guy with
no college degree and no clear direction in his youth. "They say life is what happens
to you on the way to doing what you want to do. And I've just had a series of
good things happen. But most of the good things that have happened to me in my whole
life have been because I'm a good salesman. And that's probably the basic skill.
If you're a good salesman and you can communicate well, you can almost be
anything. Almost be anything. That's what I think."

Woody's
Inventions

Hearkening back to his beginnings
working on radios, many of Woody's inventions involve sound -- a unidirectional
microphone, virtual speaker, electrostatic transducer, holographic transparent
speaker, magnetic film (for sound recording), but Woody asserts, "I
don't want to invent the same kind of stuff all the time. And since I've learned
that inventing things in different fields doesn't mean necessarily that you're a
total genius in that field because you can get that help from people that you
can hire. I've decided I want to invent totally unrelated things
like helicopters, like digital recording, like new ultrasonic speakers, like the
medical doppler thing, like so on, and so on and so on."

Following is a diverse sampling of
some of Woody's current projects:

Hypersonic
Speakers

When it comes to sound, Woody's
HyperSonic Sound System will get you closer to the music than VH1. He has
totally revolutionized the conventional box speakers we've all grown up with and
had to find room for in our living rooms. While speakers have been shrinking in
the past decade, they've still had the cumbersome woofer/tweeter/midrange in a
box design. Not to mention all the wiring needed to go to the speakers from the
receiver. Woody goes even further.

He has eliminated the box
altogether, allowing for a speaker the size of an Oreo cookie -- a mere
1/16" thick. The raw drivers look like art pieces, the imbedded circuitry
looking like an artist designed it, not an engineer.

With conventional speakers,
the sound is projected by moving the air containing the sound waves against a
cone moving back and forth inside the box. But with Woody's speakers, it's a
process that happens in the air itself. Sound is beamed at the wall and it comes
off the wall where it is imbedded on top of the ultrasound. A process that
happens in the air unimbeds it, or demodulates the two, so in essence, the room
in which you are using the speakers is, itself, the speaker box.

Again, it was inspiration
engendered by observation -- by studying physicist Hermann von Helmholtz's
findings of 150 years ago. Helmholtz noticed that when playing two loud notes on
an organ, a third note is produced, whose frequency was the difference between
the frequencies of the other two notes.

Instead of an organ, Woody uses a
crystal that produces two high-pitched beams of sound beyond human hearing. The
listener hears the difference in frequency between the two waves.

The crystal wafer projects the
sound across the room onto a flat surface (a wall, for instance), like a
ventriloquist throws its voice -- it's the sound equivalent of a spotlight.

One aspect of this design is that,
unlike conventional speakers, the level of sound stays the same wherever you
move in the room -- unless you're standing right by the speaker itself.

"That's pretty revolutionary being
able to make sound that you don't hear unless it's a distance off," says Woody.

In addition, the speakers feature
"limited dispersion" -- the sound stays where it is beamed so the sound
absorbing objects in the room (couch, rugs, etc.) are taken out of the formula
to a great degree. So there's no compromise when you get your new speakers home
-- they'll sound as good as they do in the store. "They will sound more the same
in a room than any other speaker you will buy," says Woody.

Woody is also developing a woofer
for deep bass. It has been harder to shrink, but Woody's gotten it down to the
size of a frisbee which you could easily hide under a couch.

In 1997, Woody's HyperSonic Sound
received the prestigious Discover Magazine award for innovation in sound
(at 3 million subscribers, Discover is the world's largest circulated
science magazine). His competition was MIT, Toyota, and some other very
formidable minds. Woody received the award from the grandson of Thomas Edison;
he was also thrilled to meet Ray Charles, one of the judges in the sound
category.

So far, Woody has contracted with
RCA Thomson, Dolby, and Harman. With no wiring necessary, it will be a boon
for homes with flat screen TV's, movie theaters, automobile sound systems... the
possibilities are endless.

At five for $600, Woody says,
"They sound as good as $3,000 speakers if you sat them down side by
side."

Artificial Hip
Alarm

The Scripps Clinic contracted with
Woody to develop an alarm to alert a patient that his artificial hip is starting
to separate early enough that the patient can still do something about it on his
own. "With an artificial hip, some things you can never do again, like tie
your shoes, dangle your feet off the end of a bed, you have to consciously keep
these muscles tight."

If a patient relaxes too much, the
artificial hip can pop out of place, which is extremely painful and costly
($3,000) to replace. Woody's alarm alerts the patient when the artificial hip is
starting to come apart by fractions of a millimeter so that he or she can
tighten up the muscles around it and keep it in place.

The doctors didn't want anything
that needed batteries inside the human body because they would need to be
replaced from time to time. Woody's device is worn on the belt and looks like a
pager. A piece of electromagnetic tape which goes from the device to the hip
sends a signal in through the skin which bounces back and warns that the hip is
starting to move before it becomes a problem.

Helicopter

Woody's interest in flying, but
frustration with private aircraft, inspired him to develop a single-passenger
helicopter.

"I have a pilot's license and I
never fly, because a private plane is like a soapbox derby. The walls are this
thin. If you kicked your foot really hard, you could actually kick your foot
through the floor of a private airplane. They're terrible!"

Then there's Woody's tendency to
get lost. "To stay up in the air, you've got to be going 100 miles per hour. I
frequently got lost! And so, I was trying to keep the plane flying in a certain
direction and I'm also trying to look down at a map!"

And, of course, in the process,
he's traveling 100 miles an hour out of his way, so he decided to invent an
aircraft that could stop and hover in one spot while he got his bearings.

While helicopters fit the bill,
learning to fly them is difficult and expensive, costing an average of $50,000
and many months to get a license.

In addition, they can be dangerous
and difficult to fly due to the physics of the interaction between the rotating blade and
tail rotor.

"I wanted something that somebody
could learn to fly in a half an hour to an hour. I didn't know it at the time --
and I learned very quickly because you have to do that kind of research nowadays
or you're stupid -- counter- rotating blades neutralize that particular danger.
So I dreamed up this idea for my little helicopter with blades that counter-
rotate and they neutralize the gyroscopic effect." It turns out that was the
design of the first helicopter ever made.

"But, for the big payloads of
commercial helicopters, and the things they need to do, two blades was impractical, so they got rid of the second blade
and put a tail rotor on it. But for the weight class in which we fall, and
the fact that we don't want to go up to where all the traffic is, our design is
perfect and it had not been exploited in the direction I took it."

Woody and a partner funded it
through the prototype construction, utilizing the services of eight NASA
helicopter engineers. "The most brilliant thing was to get everybody out of
thinking that you need to go 150 miles per hour and up 10,000 feet. The first
question everybody asks me is how high does it go? My answer usually is, 'Who
cares? If you're off the ground, you have the thrill of flying. If you're six
feet in the air, it is the coolest thing on earth. You can go over rocks, jagged
glass, water, bogs, marshes... You're free! It's better than a motorcycle ever
thought of being!'"

If it sounds a bit risky to market
these in our litigation crazy times, understand that the computer system
basically flies it -- the pilot overrides it. "The computer won't let you do
anything totally stupid that'll cause you to flip over," asserts Woody. On the
other hand, like power steering on your car, if it goes out, you can still
operate it.

"This thing has a handlebar like a
motorcycle. It's totally intuitive the way you fly it. Even a paraplegic can get
up in one and fly it, he can be totally free. You don't need legs. It's all on
the handlebars."

Eventually, they'll make a
3-passenger version, but initially, only a one-passenger version because an
unlicensed pilot is only risking his or her own life.

"We actually have a little screen in the cockpit. You
must say,
'I have read and I accept' and you hit "enter" or the engine won't start. And
like my Lexus, which has that GPS screen on it, every time I want to use that
map, I have to say, 'I accept.' It keeps a tally every day, what time of day I
turn that map on. If I tried to sue them because I crashed into something
looking at that map, they'd say, 'Seven thousand times, Mr. Norris, you punched
' I accept' -- now how many times do you have to do it to understand what it
said? Prove to me that you read English.' That's the kind of stuff we're doing
to protect our butts."

There has already been interest
from U.S. Customs, the military, and fire and police departments. Then Woody
sees the market moving into recreation. "Honda invented the three-wheeler, which
is now the four-wheeler, the quad, the ATV -- all terrain vehicles. There was no
market data; nobody knew if it would sell. They had spare parts and they made
one. Last year, collectively, the companies that make those sold $4.5 billion
worth of those things."

Like the ATV's the only regulation
for recreational use of Woody's helicopter would be that you couldn't fly them
at night or in unauthorized areas. "There are 40,000 acres of land that's just
woods behind my house that I can fly over. I'm not touching it.
Environmentalists are going to love it."

Woody imagines it eventually
becoming a commuter vehicle. You don't need an airport to land at, when a roof
will do. It goes 2 1/2 hours on a tank of gas (5 gallons).
"The highways are jammed. If these things are proven to be safe enough in
the next five or ten year period, it will happen."

Woody expects it will cost $25,000,
half the price of a helicopter license. "This sucker is going to be big
time."